Damian Thompson is Editor of Telegraph Blogs and a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He was once described by The Church Times as a "blood-crazed ferret". He is on Twitter as HolySmoke. His latest book is The Fix: How addiction is taking over your world. He also writes about classical music for The Spectator.

Vatican sees sense over Harry Potter – at last

The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romanohas praised the latest Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for its "clear" depiction of the eternal battle between good and evil represented by the struggle between the young hero and his nemesis, the sorcerer Lord Voldemort.

I've no idea whether the film is any good, and have no intention of finding out, but I hope this means that at last the Catholic Church will stop banging on about the Potter books. I hate to disagree with the Holy Father, but I think he went completely over the top when (as Cardinal Ratzinger) he described them as "a subtle seduction, which has deeply unnoticed and direct effects in undermining the soul of Christianity before it can really grow properly".

The Church's Potter paranoia is rooted in Italian unfamiliarity with British children's popular culture, and is partly also a response to agitation by American fundamentalists. It's counterproductive, because it suggests that the Vatican can't discriminate between what is really corrosive and evil and what is harmless or mildly offensive.

My great friend the late Fr Cormac Rigby used to say that the Church was wasting its time even campaigning against Philip Pullman's atheist children's stories. "If you don't like them, come up with something better yourself," he told me.

So I hope that this is the last we will hear from the Church on the brainwashing effect of J K Rowling's books on young minds. I've got a better idea: make it a mortal sin for adults to humiliate themselves by reading these kiddies' stories.